Home >  Business

Wednesday, October 02, 2002

By Jim McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Researchers at Duquesne University have put numbers to a well-known Pittsburgh dilemma: We're an older region with a declining population that must attract many new workers in order to keep our economy stable.

"A silent crisis threatens the prosperity of Pittsburgh and southwest Pennsylvania," Silvio Baretta, research director for the university's Center for Competitive Workforce Development, said yesterday in releasing a study that warns of potentially devastating worker shortages.

The center used U.S. Census data to estimate that 11 percent of a labor force numbering 1.25 million people in a nine-county region around Pittsburgh will reach the typical retirement age of 65 within 10 years. More than a third of the labor force will reach retirement age within 20 years.

With fewer younger workers available to replace retirees, the region's economy may face a shortage of as many as 125,000 workers by 2010, the center estimates. That shortage could grow by another 100,000 by 2020, it said.

"Such labor shortages could not just stall the region's growth, but actually lead to the contraction of the region's economy," Baretta added.

Despite the current economic slowdown and layoffs, the university cited state projections that the regional economy in southwestern Pennsylvania should generate nearly 400,000 job openings, including 90,000 new jobs, within the next decade.

Preparing students to take the high-skilled jobs of the future is one potential solution noted by the center. Another is attracting foreign-born talent to a region that has in recent decades been comparatively slow in doing so.

Immigration worked for Pittsburgh before. Immigrants from European countries, as well as migration of African Americans from Southern states, placed Pittsburgh among the nation's 10 largest cities from 1910 to 1940.

In recent years, though, Pittsburgh has been largely ignored by new arrivals in contrast to a national trend that has seen immigrants contribute to the growth and revitalization of cities elsewhere.

Of the 13 million people who moved to the United States in the 1990s, only about 25,000 came to metropolitan Pittsburgh, a gain of only 8 percent. Metropolitan areas of Columbus, Ohio; Minneapolis; Kansas City, Mo.; and Indianapolis fared much better, the study said.

Newer immigrants are showing willingness to move from the major port locations where they first entered the country to more "nontraditional locations" including Midwestern states and industrial regions tagged as the rust belt, the study found.

Here, Baretta suggests that regional partnerships of business, public sector, educational institutions and civic organizations tout southwestern Pennsylvania's favorable cost of living and other attributes as a way of luring them. He cited successful programs in Detroit; Fort Wayne, Ind.; and in Iowa.

"We're certainly going to have a problem," Baretta said. "The downturn is not going to last forever."